Toxic code snippets at ESEC/FSE 2019

Chaiyong Ragkhitwetsagul presented “Toxic Code Snippets on Stack Overflow” on 29 August 2019 at ESEC/FSE 2019, the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, in Tallinn, Estonia. The paper appeared in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), and the conference accepted it for a journal-first presentation. Code copied to Stack Overflow as an example is not checked afterwards, so it can become toxic, for example by going out of date or by violating the license of the original code. The study combined two developer surveys with large-scale clone detection between 72,365 Java snippets on Stack Overflow and 111 open-source projects. Of the 201 high-reputation answerers who took part in the first survey, 69 percent said they never check for license conflicts between the code they copy and Stack Overflow's CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Researchers from University College London, the State University of Ceará in Brazil, and the University of Molise in Italy co-authored the paper.